Add a Fan to a Computer Heat Sink - no screws required

The problem: I have (had) a motherboard on my file server with a fanless heatsink over what I believe is the northbridge. According to the sensor program (ksensors) I had running in Fedora, the motherboard temperature was holding around 190F. My laptop doesn't get that hot! I wanted to add some more cooling to that chipset without having to modify anything on the motherboard.

As you can see from the picture, the heatsink is in a very inconvenient location - right up against the CPU heatsink. This gave me something I had to work around, which I think I did.

Step 1 Tools and Materials

This mod only requires a few things:

Tools

• Plyers
• Wire stripper
• Tiny screwdriver (eyeglasses type)

Materials

• Motherboard to be modded
• Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste (or another brand, but AS5 is the best)
• Isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol - the closer to 99% purity the better
• lintless cloth (coffee filters work well too)
• 1 foot of 22 gauge solid strand copper wire
• 40mm fan

Comments

[miphz]

brilliant ... nice share mate ...

[vikas bharti]

very good idea for pc cooling.......... but dont remove motherboard heatsink

[Yerboogieman]

all i have is a 120mm fan

[djr6789]

you can buy adapters on ebay that size your fan down upt o 60mm

[technopenguin]

190 degrees Fahrenheit? Almost enough to boil water.... I'm suprised the motherboard wasn't fried, maybe it was designed for that. But I would definitely cool it if it were me. Did you already have the fan on the left when it was at 190 degrees?

[frazeeg]

Just as a FYI as well, the GeForce 8800 series (some versions) can get that hot and above and still function. Tom's Hardware did a review on some coolers and found that out.

[uberinsane]

Having the GPU run that hot for very long would probably kill it.

[frazeeg]

Only if it's not rated for that temperature. But regardless, whether it's rated at that temperature or not, I agree that's it's still not good to be running that hot.

[uberinsane]

I think it's only rated for 70*C but I might be wrong...

[ReCreate]

my processor is at 88*C...is that ...bad?

[technopenguin]

88ºC is about 190ºF. That is bad if your CPU wasn't rated for that. Is this occurring in a server or a personal computer?

[ReCreate]

its a personal computer it has windows xp sp2 by the way

[technopenguin]

Either the sensor is malfunctioning (like frazeeg said his may have been) or there is a heat problem. You could put your hand a few inches from the CPU and see if there is a lot of heat. Don' t actually touch the CPU unless you're sure it's okay.

[frazeeg]

Yes, that fan was there. I'm almost certain that sensor isn't reliable. I felt all around the motherboard with it running and didn't come anywhere near to burning my hand, so either the sensor is faulty or lm_sensors isn't reading it correctly.

[Derin]

You have a NB fan slot right there.What is that connector labeled with?

[frazeeg]

Where is the slot you're talking about? If it's next to that copper coil, that's for the CPU fan.

[Derin]

It is right beside the heatsink.

[Derin]

At the left down corner.

[Mario1]

Great cable management :)

[alleria]

usually what i use is heat sinks i have laying around off of mobos vid cards. Im sure at some time i bought a kit and i have bought a few orbs for vid cards, but i rarely buy anything. 1 friend laughed when i put a p3 heatsink on a nvidia card darn thing took up 2 slots for the heat sink it self. I remeber putting a heatsink on a little pci card a few yrs ago darn thing was prolly only worth 10 bux if that but on the other hand it wasnt a big heatsink either. I always say when its late and you need to get something running what ever works works.

[alleria]

imho if your going to remove the heatsink that came with the board why bother putting it back on. but that is a pretty kewl way to get a fan to stay where you want

[frazeeg]

I'm not gonna pay for an aftermarket heatsink if that's what you mean. Especially not for a low-intensity system.

[MD_Willington]

ECS KT series mainboard??

[frazeeg]

ECS K8M800-M2 I wish though that I had gotten one with Hot Swap for the SATA ports...but that's another story.

[MD_Willington]

I've done similar on my Biostar system and my ECS K7S5A... Cooling always helps!

[!Andrew_Modder!]

nice